The Daring Kitchen- Sans Rival

Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers’ host and she challenged us to make a traditional Filipino dessert – the delicious Sans Rival cake! And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for Bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog.


I decided to use Catherine's recipe for the heavenly cake as my basis, with a few changes to the cake overall. The actual cake part or meringue was easy to make and bake, but the hard part came when melting the sugar for the buttercream. I messed up once and came close the second time(faulty candy thermometer...).

But in the end it paid off with a truly fantastic cake that my whole family loved, too bad i gave half away to my grandmother.

The Daring Kitchen -- Cooking with Tea

Sarah from Simply Cooked was our November Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to create something truly unique in both taste and technique! We learned how to cook using tea with recipes from Tea Cookbook by Tonia George and The New Tea Book by Sara Perry.

I decided to search the Internet for other recipes for my project and found where several people use tea for smoking meat. I did a smoked chicken breast using Assam tea, brown sugar and wild rice in a homemade foil stovetop smoker. The breast ended up with a really dark brown outside with a very smoky flavor that was unique. For plating, a light sauce was made using the same tea, raisins and brown sugar.

My pictures will uploaded later. Having technical difficulties.